Journal of Religion & Film Volume 22 Article 3 Issue 2 October 2018 10-1-2018 Terrence Malick Beyond Nature and Grace: Song to Song and the Experience of Forgiveness Elisa Zocchi University of Münster, [email protected] Recommended Citation Zocchi, Elisa (2018) "Terrence Malick Beyond Nature and Grace: Song to Song and the Experience of Forgiveness," Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 22 : Iss. 2 , Article 3. Available at: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol22/iss2/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UNO. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Religion & Film by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Terrence Malick Beyond Nature and Grace: Song to Song and the Experience of Forgiveness Abstract In The Tree of Life Terrence Malick poses the question of the relation between the order of grace and the order of nature in the cosmos and in human existence, a question presented through the relation of mother and father in the O'Brien family. The aim of this article is to analyze this issue and to present the role of glory in The rT ee of Life as the transfiguration of nature operated by grace. Specifically, the example of forgiveness as one strand of this glory seems to be an helpful tool to understand the movie. Forgiveness, already present in The rT ee of Life, becomes particularly important then in Song to Song. I will present this movie as an exemplar analysis of the human soul and of the capacity of forgiveness to draw the soul close to the eternal, as already happening in The rT ee of Life. Underlining the relationship between forgiveness, sacrifice and glory will help to understand both the continuity between the two movies and the specificity of Song to Song. Keywords Malick, Song to Song, The rT ee of Life, Nature, Grace, Glory, Forgiveness Author Notes Elisa Zocchi is a PhD student in Theology at Münster University (Germany). She is part of the EU project "The iH story of Human Freedom and Dignity in Western Civilization." She holds a Bachelor and Master in Philosophy at the Catholic University of Milan, where she focused on History of Contemporary Philosophy, with a Thesis on Martin Heidegger. Her PhD dissertation deals with the Ressourcement of the Church Fathers in 20th Century Catholic Theology, particularly Origen's revival in the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac. This article is available in Journal of Religion & Film: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol22/iss2/3 Zocchi: Terrence Malick: Song to Song and the Experience of Forgiveness Introduction It is impossible to think of Terrence Malick without recalling his philosophical background: a summa cum laude Harvard graduate, Malick was fascinated by Heidegger thanks to Stanley L. Cavell’s Philosophy class and ready to move to Oxford to write a dissertation on Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Oxford, however, was not the right place: “These were the days [when] Oxford was analytical philosophy. The last thing anyone at the philosophy department there wanted was to supervise a dissertation on Heidegger. So he kept on hitting a blank wall.”1 After long discussions on his dissertation topic, Malick left Oxford and, with it, any academic future. Why does this matter? The answer comes from Malick himself when asked “why philosophy?” According to a testimony, Malick confessed that he had been extremely disappointed by philosophy at Harvard because none of the classes “helped him understand himself or his place in the order of the cosmos.”2 If it is true that every film is a way to deal with a burning question, then Malick’s films are his way to answer the question of human dwelling. The clearest example seems to be The Tree of Life (2011).3 This movie has indeed been the subject of articles, books, and conferences not only in film-studies, but also philosophy and theology, throughout the last ten years.4 When public interest in Malick started to wane, the academic interest seemed to diminish as well. Starting from To the Wonder (2012), the first movie to receive extremely negative reviews, scholars lost the habit of writing on Malick: it is still hard to find well-articulated reflections on Knight of Cups (2015) and Song to Song (2017). In particular, Song to Song has Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2018 1 Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 22 [2018], Iss. 2, Art. 3 been described as “plumbing new boreholes of cringe,” “hitting all the wrong notes,” “sometimes exasperating, sometimes mesmeric,” and has made critics wonder whether Terrence Malick “should take a break.”5 The aim of my paper is not only an attempt to overcome this gap by reflecting on his latest film Song to Song, but also to understand the relation that this movie has with the more considered The Tree of Life. It is indeed my conviction that a deep connection is present, between the two movies that still needs to be studied. Specifically, I believe Song to Song to deepen one fundamental aspect of The Tree of Life – the relation between nature and grace – on a more existential level. If The Tree of Life, with its opening statement on the orders of nature and grace, clearly recognizes an underlying struggle within the cosmos as a whole, I believe Malick illustrates this struggle at play within the depths of the particular human soul particularly well in Song to Song. That is, the same struggle is illustrated, but on a personal-scale rather than cosmic. Furthermore, I claim that this approach in Song to Song allows Malick to focus particularly well on one of the many “routes of grace” present in The Tree of Life, the route of forgiveness. To be clear, if The Tree of Life proposes an expanded vision of grace and its relation to glory (a concept that I will here analyze), I believe Song to Song to present clearly one of the possible declinations of this glory in the human experience, particularly in its relational aspect. https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol22/iss2/3 2 Zocchi: Terrence Malick: Song to Song and the Experience of Forgiveness 1. The Two Orders in Reality: The Tree of Life (voice over of Mrs. O’Brien): The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it, too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it, when love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. The opening lines of The Tree of Life seem to give us a guide for the entire movie. We are told there is a dichotomy in life between two ways: nature and grace.6 These two ways have been recognized by the vast literature on this film to be embodied by Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien, Father (nature) and Mother (grace). It is indeed evident that these two characters are archetypes of the cosmic adventure that Malick wants to narrate through the history of a normal American family. The plot of the movie is simple. The O’Brien’s have three sons: Jack, RL, and Steve. We soon find out that RL dies around the age of 19. We follow Mrs. O’Brien in her grief over her loss; soon after, we meet a grown-up Jack wondering about his brother’s death and, consequently, about the meaning of his entire life. He poses the same question as a child when experiencing the death of a friend: “Where were you? You let a boy drown. You’ll do anything.” It is not without meaning that his own name, Jack O’Brien, brings us to the opening quote of the movie, from the Book of Job. His questions is also the question of the crying mother over the loss of her child (“Why? Where were you? Did you know? Who are we to you? Answer me!”), a question that Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2018 3 Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 22 [2018], Iss. 2, Art. 3 becomes the origin of the great scene of the creation of the cosmos, which seems to be a suggested answer to the question about the origin of each soul. This clearly mirrors God’s answer to Job’s question about innocent suffering, an answer that Malick puts indeed as an epigraph at the outset of the film.7 Creation flows and we find ourselves following the birth and growth of the O’Brien children, their education, their first experiences of love and pain, always lived through their relation with their mother and father. The mother’s presence dominates the entire movie. It is the order of grace that introduces each child into the experiences of life. But not only that: they see her accepting the suffering coming from a hard husband. The father indeed represents the order of nature, the necessity of being strong, of “fighting back” against adversity: “your mother is naïve. It takes fierce will to get ahead in this world. If you’re good, people take advantage of you.” Jack, whom we follow closely throughout the movie, is clearly the son of both: “Mother. Father. Always you wrestle in me.” Nature and grace are united as in a marriage; they are both present in the education of the children and, however much we are tempted to see grace as the “right” way against the greediness of nature, it is also clear that one cannot be without the other without risk of collapsing.